Sketch-Farm, Gloucester

1915

In the first few years of his career, Stuart Davis worked in the style of the Ashcan School, creating paintings featuring straightforward representations of urban subject matter. Davis, however, was a constant experimenter and he hungrily absorbed virtually every new style that he encountered, from Post-Impressionism to Fauvism to Cubism.

Sketch—Farm, Gloucester is part of a group of paintings in which Davis began to process the work of the Cubists, which he had seen at the Armory Exhibition of Modern Art in 1913 (an exhibit in which he, at the age of nineteen, had also participated). This painting’s radically skewed perspective, greatly simplified forms, and bold colors and brushwork all attest to the powerful impact of Davis’s encounter with modern art. Over the next decade he refined and experimented with many of these elements as he developed his own mature abstract style.